


Fine Skies Today

by lucymonster



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ahch-To, Guilt, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-11-14 03:15:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18044429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: Luke finds the birthplace of the Jedi Order. It costs him everything.





	Fine Skies Today

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aurae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aurae/gifts).



Torrential rain glances off the X-wing’s shield dome. When Luke shuts off the engine, it hits the pilot’s hatch instead and drenches the viewport with a thick running sheet that turns the outside world into a blur of green and grey.

The ship will get much wetter, later on, when it plunges over the cliff into the churning waters far below. But Luke hasn’t made that decision yet.

He climbs out of the hatch and greets the raging skies with an upturned face until he’s soaked, too. The grass is springy beneath his feet, well-watered and untrodden. Everything teems with energy. With the Force. It’s in his head, it’s in his blood, it’s all around him. The island is alive. He’s found what he came looking for.

In the distance, in the back of his mind, he hears the pained shrieks of everything it cost him.

* * *

On a happier day, almost a full standard year ago now, Luke sat in the ramshackle back room of the traveller’s inn where Lor San Tekka had washed up after his last voyage. Getting there had taken too many long, dreary hours to count. The place was little more than a waystation, a watering hole on the long, hard road between more interesting places.

To Ben it had seemed a cosmopolitan marvel – Ben who’d grown up on Chandrila, kicking his grav-ball between the boxy lawns of Hanna City and the sprawling agricultural lands around it. Ben who’d left his homeworld only recently to come and train with Luke at an isolated temple retreat. His young eyes had gone wide and bright when he saw the local marketplace, bustling with exotic visitors and the even more exotic goods they were buying, and Luke had allowed himself a momentary lapse from stern Jedi master to indulgent uncle. Ben, smiling widely, had dashed off to explore the station, and Luke had gone on alone to the inn to find what they’d come for.

‘I’ve never been out there,’ said Lor, as he poured two cups of lukewarm tea from the pot the grudging matron had brought them. ‘It’s a hard road, Luke – gravity wells and asteroid belts everywhere you turn. If there are people living out there, they’re the sort that prefer to keep to themselves. The spiritual heart of the galaxy? I’d be surprised if you find so much as a local shrine to pay your respects at.’

‘Shrines are no great rarity in the outer reaches,’ said Luke, though that wasn't the point. The tea had a sharp metallic tang in his mouth, its natural tannins lent strength and body by long infusion in the rusty pot it came from. ‘The Force is perfectly capable of flourishing outside our metropolitan hotspots. Some would even argue it does better away from them.’

‘True.’ It wasn’t in Lor's nature to dismiss a theory out of hand – any theory, no matter how tenuous. ‘And it’s true, too, that uneti wood features prominently in what few art and relics the early Jedi left us. It may well be that the spread of their saplings marks a trail back to the first temple. But–’

‘But it’s a long way to travel on a botanical hunch,’ said Luke, lips twisting wryly.

‘A long and very difficult way, at that.’

‘So you recommend I drop it?’

Lor smiled over the rim of his teacup, but it wasn’t a happy smile. ‘My old friend, even if I thought you’d listen, I wouldn’t recommend that. The galaxy is ripe for exploration, and the Force cries out for its origins to be unearthed. Go where your heart tells you to go. I only caution you not to go expecting simple answers.’

They finished the pot of tea, but only out of respect for the matron’s feelings. And when he got back to the market square where he’d agreed to meet Ben, Luke found that his nephew had finished a pot of something far stronger: his cheeks were flushed, and the smile on his face was distinctly sloppy as he held up the leather-corded pendant he’d brought back from some overpriced souvenir stall.

‘Ben,’ said Luke, in his best disapproving master voice. Ben ignored it and looped the pendant over Luke’s head. ‘What have you been drinking?’

‘The stall owner said it was a local specialty,’ Ben told him cheerfully. He didn’t seem to notice the unwelcome goosebumps that rose on Luke’s neck at the brush of his fingertips. ‘Comes in a hollowed-out melon shell with those little paper umbrellas. It’s made of fruit.’

_ ‘Fermented _ fruit, I gather.’

‘You should try some, it’s very–’

‘Back to the ship,’ said Luke. He didn’t like the idea of them spending time together with Ben’s inhibitions lowered. He liked even less the idea of lowering his own. That was long before he’d found it in himself to admit that his uneasiness around Ben came from more than just the colour of his presence in the Force – that if he looked inside himself, really looked, he'd see more than just an uncle's fondness in the way his hand darted out to steady Ben's swaying body.

But after they boarded – Ben stumbled a little on the entry ramp, and again on the edge of the passenger seat – Luke found his attention caught by the pendant. The warmth of Ben’s touch didn’t fade, but instead seemed to linger in the lacquered wood carving where it lay against Luke’s chest. And when he held it up to inspect…

‘Why did you buy this, Ben?’

Ben blinked at him. With his senses dulled by liquor, his usual hair-trigger touchiness took longer to engage. Luke almost thought he could see the impulse travelling through his thoughts and gathering itself on his tongue. ‘It’s just a souvenir. If you don’t want it–’

‘No, it was very considerate, thank you. I just mean … what made you choose this particular pendant?’

‘I dunno.’ Ben shrugged, sinking a little lower in his seat. His drunken limbs sprawled out around him, a tangled knot of tripwires Luke could all too easily have caught himself on. ‘I just liked it when I picked it up. It looked like the kind of thing you’d wear.’

Luke traced the grain of the wood with his thumb. Uneti. Even polished and processed to oblivion, he could feel the old tree’s life blood and its thrumming connection to the Force. Like a message. Like a beacon, calling out to him. Like a signpost on the road that read, ‘You’re on the right track’.

At the time, he didn’t recognise the irony that it was Ben who gave him that final clue to the Jedi Order’s long lost origins. He was too busy repeating the words  _ uncle, master, Jedi _ like a mantra in his head, in the vain hope that they’d cleanse him of the dark and inappropriate feelings that lingered too long for easy denial whenever his nephew’s hands touched him.

* * *

An imprecise number of years and months later – time moves strangely on the island, passing in leaps and long stretches of stillness – Luke will sit by the firepit that the Caretakers have stoked to life and listen to their stories of millenia gone by.

He’ll have picked up the local language by then, the avio-amphibian words falling awkwardly from his human tongue. They’ll listen with forbearance while he stumbles through fragmented questions: ‘How old is this place? Who else has visited? Why do you stay here and tend an empty village?’

‘Old,’ the Caretakers will say. ‘Older than history, older than visitors. They say the world was made in a nine day storm, when the life-giving rains united sky with earth and sea with land and fish with bird. Our men folk come back to us from the seas every month, and we feast and make merry and celebrate life. No one else ever visits – certainly no one like you. This village has never been empty. We have always tended it and we always will.’

He’ll sleep in a rough stone hut when the rains come. On clear nights, when the wind blows away the clinging fog, he’ll lie out by the firepit under the stars. Sometimes the Caretakers will come out and sit with him. More often they’ll ignore him, absorbed in their neverending business of sweeping stones and scrubbing linens and scaling fish for their twice-daily meals. They’ll tell him his presence doesn’t concern them – he’s peaceful. He means no harm to them or the island.

‘How can you know that?’ he’ll ask, and they’ll shake their heads at the endless questions of a sweet but rather foolish child.

‘Do you feel it in the Force?’ he’ll ask them.

They’ll look at him, nonplussed. The Caretakers live in the birthplace of the Jedi, but they’ve never so much as heard of the Force. It saturates every particle around them. Infuses the very air they breathe. It’s everything, and nothing. One day, sometime very soon, Luke will cut himself off from it forever.

‘I’m not peaceful,’ he’ll try to tell them. ‘I’m not harmless. You can’t possibly know the things I’ve done, the mistakes I’ve made, the people I’ve failed. The devastation I’ve wrought on the galaxy.’

As he speaks, the Caretakers will look up at the sky. Theirs is a weather-based religion, where the only cosmic will that matters is carried in the rain clouds that gather and disperse above the endless Ahch-To ocean.

‘Fine skies today,’ they’ll tell him, indifferent to the consuming darkness that Luke has unleashed through his weakness and fear. ‘No clouds on the horizon, no rains. Good day for hanging out the linens.’

* * *

Leaving his starfighter behind, Luke sets out from the landing flat and trudges through the rain along the precarious mountainside path. He climbs over jagged rocks and slips on muddy embankments, carefully avoids the burrows in the earth and the feathery nests in his cliffside handholds. Everywhere he looks are signs of life, but the island’s natives are nowhere to be seen – they’re hiding from the violent weather, or perhaps from the strange newcomer tramping uninvited through their sanctuary.

He’s panting when he reaches the plateau. His calves burn, his shoulders ache beneath the straps of his pack, and he’s blinded by the raindrops that sting his face through the curtain of wet hair hanging over his eyes. He wipes it away. Sits down on a rock. Looks out at the churning ocean that encircles him on every side.

Later, in a fit of despair, he’ll strip his ship of every useful part and push whatever’s left over the edge to corrode in saltwater. He’ll make up his mind to die on this island. But that grim resolve hasn’t taken him yet. It’s all still too new.

After all these years of searching, he can’t quite remember what made him want to come here. The victory rings hollow. Luke has failed as a Jedi, or perhaps the Jedi have failed as a concept, but either way, his arrival is no great pilgrimage. He’s alone. It’s raining.

He’s sitting at the birthplace of the Force and all he feels is cold and lonely and full of regret.

‘I can’t believe you’re still wearing that thing,’ Ben told him, roughly six months after their trip to the waystation. Not long before Luke would give into temptation and slink inside his nephew’s bedroom, bent on disgracing himself in one way but driven by guilt and confusion to disgrace himself in another way altogether.

The pendant hung around Luke’s neck then like it hangs today, thin leather cord and carved, lacquered wood worn smoother by the frequent unconscious rubbing of Luke’s thumb. ‘It was a gift from my favourite student,’ said Luke.

‘It was a rip-off from a dumb tourist trap,’ said Ben. ‘I wouldn’t have bought it if that stall owner hadn’t gotten me drunk first.'

Uneti wood. It’s native to Ahch-To, strong in the light side of the Force, and long disregarded by the galaxy’s botanists. The stall owner back then wouldn’t have known that he was selling a piece of priceless Jedi history to the only Force user in the galaxy who was sensitive enough to be drawn to it but too disengaged from the light to realise why. He wouldn’t have known that it would lead Luke here. No one could have known.

The pendant rests against his chest now, warm against the chilling rain as the island welcomes it home.


End file.
